AFSCME Prepares For Political Battle To Elect Pro-Worker Government

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/6180

AFSCME Prepares For Political Battle To Elect Pro-Worker Government - 06/19/07

By Doug Cunningham

Two thousand activists and leaders from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) are meeting in Washington, D.C. to plan and mobilize a political and legislative strategy to advance workers interests. Ethan Rome is AFSCME Public Affairs Director.

: "This conference is about bringing two thousand of our activists from all across the country together to make battle plans to keep the Congress in Democratic, pro-worker hands, to win the presidency, to win Democratic governors and statehouses all across the country."

AFSCME plans to field an activist army of 40,000 people in the 2008 elections. Rome says the leadership of Congress is committed to being pro-worker, but with an anti-worker president and just a slim Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate more work has to be done in 2008 to take back the country for working families.

[BlackHawk706867]

1. Ok, this is a very honest question by someone that has been a ...

union member most of my working life... (I am almost 59 now) Why is it that the executive of this unions look like they just crawled out of a liquor bottle? The President of AFSCME on Tweety tonite, was no exception... My guess is that his liver is not far from falling out of his body, if reading physical signs are correct.

ww

[Omaha Steve]

2. President Gerald W. McEntee bio and a little more

I met Gerry two years ago at a Kerry/Edwards rally. He was sober. He comes from an organizing background. He was sober when I met him anyway.

http://www.afscme.org/about/740.cfm




President Gerald W. McEntee

President Gerald W. McEnteeGerald W. McEntee is the International President of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the most aggressive and politically active organizing unions in the AFL-CIO. Since 1998, nearly 250,000 public service workers have joined AFSCME through organizing campaigns. McEntee was first elected AFSCME President in 1981 and was re-elected in June 2004 to another four-year term.

As a Vice President of the AFL-CIO, a member of its Executive Council and chair of the Political Education Committee, McEntee is a key leader of the labor movement and its political program. Under McEntee's leadership, the federation created its highly successful and much imitated voter education campaigns, which helped increase the number of union household voters to a record 26 percent of the electorate in 2000 (up from 19 percent in 1992).

McEntee has long been a leader in the fight to reform the nation's health care system. President Clinton named McEntee to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Quality and Consumer Protection in the Health Care Industry in 1997.

McEntee is a co-founder and chairman of the board of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, the preeminent voice for working Americans on the economy. He has led efforts to strengthen and improve such workplace standards as the minimum wage, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

For his efforts to improve the lives of working families, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights presented McEntee with its prestigious Hubert H. Humphrey Award in 2004.

Before assuming the presidency of AFSCME, McEntee began his distinguished career as a labor leader in Pennsylvania in 1958. As a union organizer in Philadelphia, he led the drive to unionize more than 75,000 Pennsylvania public service employees, which at that time was the largest union mobilization in history. He was elected Executive Director at the founding convention of AFSCME Council 13 in Pennsylvania in 1973 and an International Vice President of AFSCME in 1974.

McEntee holds a bachelor's degree in economics from LaSalle University in Philadelphia. A native of Philadelphia, McEntee and his wife Barbara live in Washington, D.C.

[ellenfl]

3. yippee! eom